Chapter 74 — The Boy Beside Her

I marked the next junction before following Harry into a short passage. A circular stone door stood at its end, covered by seven metal snakes whose bodies crossed and recrossed in the lantern light.

Harry glanced at me. I told him to try the same thing, but to stand to one side first. His hissing sounded louder between the close walls; one by one the snakes withdrew their heads from the loops around them, and the door divided down the middle.

I stopped Harry from raising the lantern above our faces. ‘Keep it low until we know what’s there.’ He lowered his arm, and we entered with our eyes on the stone ahead of our feet.

A narrow causeway crossed dark water. Pillars rose on either side, carved with coiling snakes whose open mouths disappeared into the shadows overhead. Far ahead, an enormous face occupied the end wall, and something pale lay on the platform beneath it.

Harry said Ginny’s name and started forward. I caught his robe just long enough to slow him, reminding him to watch the ground and listen. We crossed the rest together, with our footsteps carrying over water in which I could see no movement.

Ginny lay on her back, her hair spread across the stone. The freckles stood out against her pale face, and beside one hand lay the black diary. Harry set the lantern on dry stone and knelt to call her name while I put the carrier behind a broken length of edging, where it could not slide into the water.

Her skin was cold. I bent close enough to feel a breath at her lips, so shallow that finding it did very little to reassure me.

‘She’s breathing.’ Harry put an arm beneath her shoulders and said we could carry her between us. Before I could help him lift, a voice spoke from the nearest pillar.

‘I wouldn’t move her yet.’ The boy standing beside it had dark hair, a prefect’s badge and the same composed face I had watched in the diary. I was on my feet before I had finished recognising him.

Lantern light reached him oddly. For a moment, the edge of the pillar remained visible through his sleeve, though the wand in his hand appeared solid enough.

‘That’s hers,’ Harry said. Riddle glanced at the wand and told him Ginny would not be needing it for a little while.

I moved between him and the carrier, keeping Ginny close enough to reach with my foot. A long, yellowed fang lay among the smaller bones near the edge; I noticed its point, then looked back towards the diary. I wanted the book away from her, and his wand was directed towards the space I would have to cross.

‘You sent the voice through the pipes,’ I said. Riddle smiled as though I had supplied an answer he had been waiting to hear.

‘Potter heard it, then. I was beginning to wonder whether the school would take my warning seriously enough.’ His eyes moved to Harry, whose hand tightened beneath Ginny’s shoulders.

Harry demanded to know what he had done to her. Riddle described her worries and secrets, all the things she had been afraid to tell her family. He had answered kindly, he said, and she had given him more and more of herself.

‘You asked questions,’ he added, looking at me. ‘Much less rewarding.’ His outline seemed a little clearer than it had when he first stepped out.

‘You didn’t answer them honestly.’ I shifted my weight towards the book. ‘You showed me Hagrid with a spider, then brought me back before I could see anything else.’

‘And you went to find the spider.’ He watched my hand as I bent. ‘Leave that, Mercer.’

The wand moved, and I stopped with my fingers above my knee. He had given my curiosity a direction, and I had followed it a very long way. Knowing that did not make every choice since then his achievement, but it made this particular choice uncomfortably clear.

Harry looked from the diary to the boy. ‘You’re supposed to be a memory. Memories don’t take people’s wands.’

Riddle raised Ginny’s wand and turned it between his fingers. ‘This one is learning.’ The hand holding it no longer looked quite transparent, and beside Harry, Ginny’s head had begun to loll against his arm.

I kept my eyes on the wand. ‘You used her to open the Chamber and release the creature. You made her kill the cockerels as well.’

His eyes narrowed before the smile returned. He said she had been helpful, particularly when she could not remember what she had done. Then she began finding things she could not explain: mud, feathers and gaps in her day.

‘She didn’t want any of it,’ Harry said. He adjusted his hold on Ginny, giving her head better support while Riddle watched.

‘Eventually she became frightened enough to try getting rid of me.’ Riddle made it sound like ingratitude. I remembered Myrtle’s anger over the book thrown into the water, and the name I had found inside its cover.

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‘Then I picked you up,’ I said. ‘So you sent her to our room to take you back.’

He inclined his head. ‘Your owl objected.’ My bandage tightened as I curled my hand, and I made myself ask the next question before that anger could move me into his wand’s line.

‘Where was the diary when they searched her things?’ McGonagall had said the staff searched them. A missing book did not become less dangerous because I could not explain where it had been.

‘Behind the loose stone below the dry tap. Where I told her to put it.’ He looked down at the diary beside Ginny. ‘She had time to retrieve me after the excitement in the hospital.’

I said the word fire, and his expression brightened. Concern for helpless patients was predictable, he told us, as if he had discovered an interesting defect in the people who had carried Hermione out of the smoke.

I wanted to hurt him then. Hermione’s rigid hand and the moving beds were still clear in my mind, and he had used both their helplessness and the people trying to protect them. I kept looking at his wand instead of taking the step I wanted to take.

Harry asked about Dumbledore speaking to Ginny. Riddle said he had spent months telling her what would happen if anyone discovered her secrets; frightening her had taken time, and a single conversation would not necessarily undo it.

That was his account. Ginny could not answer it, and I could not tell how much he claimed because he wanted us afraid of something already done. She lay almost motionless while he spoke, and his outline was becoming harder to distinguish from an ordinary boy’s.

Her hand moved against the stone. Harry bent close and whispered her name, drawing Riddle’s attention back to him. For the first time, the easy amusement left the boy’s face.

‘You were the interesting part, Potter. She told me about you so often that I almost became bored of it.’ He paused on the word almost. ‘All that power, defeated by a child.’

I straightened slowly, keeping my hand clear of the book. ‘Dumbledore read my letter. He recognised your name and told us who you became.’

Riddle looked towards me. The silence lasted long enough for me to hear another drop of water land beyond the pillars, then Harry said Voldemort’s name without rising from Ginny’s side.

‘A name worth remembering.’ Riddle lifted the wand and wrote Tom Marvolo Riddle in burning letters above the platform. With a movement of his wrist, he broke them apart and arranged them into the words I am Lord Voldemort.

Harry watched the display without moving. ‘Dumbledore already told us,’ he said, and the letters remained suspended a moment longer before Riddle swept them away.

Even that performance had taken his attention briefly from my hands. I let one move closer to the pouch, then asked whether Dumbledore had suspected Hagrid the first time.

Riddle’s mouth tightened. The school had been going to close, he said, and he had no intention of returning to the place where he spent his holidays. Someone had needed to be caught, and Hagrid had provided an excellent alternative.

I remembered the boy trying to shield a wooden box with his body. Riddle had chosen every part of that scene for me, yet Hagrid’s fear had still been plain enough to survive the telling.

‘You killed a girl, then gave them somebody else.’ I waited while Riddle glanced towards Ginny, as though one small body could explain the other.

‘One girl. The work had barely begun.’ Harry’s knuckles whitened against the stone, but his arm remained beneath Ginny’s shoulders.

‘She was a person,’ Harry said. Riddle regarded the objection as if he had heard it from somebody too young to follow the argument.

He called the dead girl a Mudblood and described her as exactly the sort Slytherin had wanted removed. I had heard the slur thrown at Hermione in anger. In his calm voice, it made the beds upstairs sound like an intended result, carefully entered at the end of somebody’s notes.

‘You kept the diary because Dumbledore was watching you,’ I said. ‘A way to get somebody else to continue it.’

Riddle described a record of himself at sixteen, when he had already accomplished more than most of his teachers understood. Then he spread his empty hand. Its outline no longer shimmered against the pillar.

‘Ginny has made something more possible. When she has nothing left to give, I shall no longer be a memory.’ Harry shifted as her head slipped lower, and Riddle looked pleased. ‘And now Dumbledore is gone. The school was most obliging about that.’

‘Lucius Malfoy brought a document signed by governors. You didn’t sign it.’ I watched him instead of the hand he was displaying. I was tired of being invited to believe every fear and mistake in the castle belonged to his design.

He asked whether it mattered whose hand opened a door. It mattered to me, but winning that argument would not move his wand away from Ginny or put the diary in my reach. Harry had begun adjusting his knees beneath himself, trying to find a position from which he could lift her quickly.

‘Tell me how you survived,’ Riddle said to him. Harry looked up, keeping Ginny’s head supported while the question hung between them.

‘I don’t owe you an explanation.’ Riddle came back with questions about Harry’s mother and the magic she had used, each one sharper than the last.

‘She died protecting me.’ Harry held his gaze. ‘And Dumbledore knows more about it than you do.’

Riddle leaned forward, as if the answer had something in it he could prise loose. I slipped a strip from the pouch and held it flat against my palm. The movement was small enough to finish before a clear note sounded high among the pillars.

It seemed to come from several directions at once, filling the dark spaces above the water. Riddle turned his head, and I looked only as high as the nearest arch, where red and gold swept into view.

Fawkes came down carrying something ragged in his talons. For a moment I could think only of the blackened little creature on the floor of Dumbledore’s office. This bird blazed with colour as he passed over the platform and dropped his burden towards me.

I caught it against my left arm, keeping the prepared strip in my other hand. The Sorting Hat sagged over my wrist, its battered folds as familiar and inexplicable as anything I could have been handed in that place.

Riddle laughed. ‘A bird and an old hat. There is your Headmaster’s assistance.’ Fawkes landed on a broken pillar, tilting his head towards us.

I gave the hat to Harry. ‘Keep it. He brought it for a reason.’ Harry tucked it through his belt, freeing both hands, and looked at me over Ginny’s head.

I glanced towards the causeway behind him. He shifted his knees again, preparing to lift her, but this time Riddle saw the movement too.

‘I said she stays.’ His wand came up, and I brought the strip away from my palm.